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Overtime

What is there to be thankful for? Well ...

Posted
Friday, November 17, 2017 3:55 pm

Column by Jim Benton

Thanksgiving is a day for a tasty meal, watching some football and having fun with family and friends who are like family.

Thanksgiving is a time to offer thanks for many things that are sometimes overlooked like hugs, good health, children, grandchildren, dishwashers, snowblowers, good car batteries on sub-zero mornings, friends, a companion dog, spellcheck and short lines.

I could go on and on, but for sports fans, here are just a few things for which to be thankful.

Thankfully the Colorado High School Activities Association will likely change the Class 5A alignments for football leagues and hopefully someday might figure out a way to decide state playoff soccer games without using a shootout. Thankfully the 4A and 5A state basketball tournaments have returned to Denver.

There are other thankful athletic things like upsets (except against the team you are supporting), last-second victories or walk-off hits, rallies, more attention being paid to concussions, gluten-free Nut-Thins and one league in Major League Baseball that doesn’t use the designated hitter.

Proposed volleyball change

This is an assumption and I know assumptions can be dangerous.

I assume that maybe some members of the CHSAA volleyball committee were at the Nov. 10-11 state volleyball championships at the Denver Coliseum and realized change is needed.

On Nov. 13, the committee unanimously recommended a bracket format starting for next year’s tournament and that proposal will go to the Legislative Council for their approval in January.

If approved it would mean no more pool play, an extra day of the tournament and all classifications would use a modified double elimination format sometimes referred to as the Olympic Crossover Bracket.

That means no more tiebreakers, meaningless matches when a team has already secured a semifinal berth, and the possibility that sessions can start on time instead of the finals starting an hour and 40 minutes after the scheduled start, which happened on Nov. 11.

I was at the Coliseum for over 12 hours on Nov. 11 before Castle View finally wrapped up the Class 5A title.

With the new proposal, the top four seeds in each class would receive first-round byes with seeds No. 5-12 playing in the first matches. Winners would advance to battle the top four seeds while the first round losers drop into the contenders’ brackets but would still have a chance to advance to the semifinals.

The bracket, a sample of which can be found online at CHSAANow.com, becomes single-elimination in the semifinals, which differs from the double-elimination format used in the baseball playoffs.

The volleyball committee’s proposal is something else to be thankful for.